Jake Johnson & Rosemarie DeWitt – Digging For Fire

Q) Where did the idea for Digging For Fire come from?

Jake: Joe [Swanberg] and I had worked together on Drinking Buddies and we had a really great experience. I realized by working on that how collaborative Joe was because we just had a treatment for it. You talk to him about ideas and then all of a sudden you see it in a movie. I was digging in my backyard with my wife because we put in a garden a few years ago and I came across a bone. I wasn’t sure if it was a dog or human bone. I also came across a  rusted gun (it could have been a real or kid gun – I don’t know), a bag of marbles, a license plate and a bunch of other stuff. So, I freaked out and called the police. The scene in the movie where they say it’s not their job to dig up somebody’s trash happened in real life. Then, I went on an adventure with my wife and a bunch of friends looking for this body and we thought it was very Stand By Me. Joe said, “Let’s make it into a movie, but have it so your wife doesn’t want you to do it because it wasn’t your house.” We didn’t have a script, we just had an outline. When we realized we were going to be telling two stories (his story and her story), we needed an actor who was strong enough to not only execute the wife’s story, but help write it. That’s how we got Rosemarie.

Q) Talk about the casting for this movie.

Jake: The way this one was cast we knew we wanted to do this movie and Joe wanted it to feel like an LA movie. So, part of making an LA movie was celebrity faces. Joe and I are two guys from Chicago so it still weirds me out when I go to an event and see someone’s face where I go, “Oh! There’s that dude from that thing!” When we were talking about an LA movie, everywhere you go is another face that you kind of know from somewhere. When we realized we we wanted to make that kind of movie, it was just calling or texting people saying, “We only need you for a day or two days and you’ll have a lot of freedom with your character, but this is the arc we need you to do.” We were very fortunate that people were around.

Q) Since you were the co-writer of this movie, does it help your acting?

Jake: I would say this one was trickier just for me to be an actor because there were so many actors. I talked to Joe about it afterwards, but I found myself being more reactionary at times because we would paint this story and have these general strokes that we had to do. But I would look around and there would be so much talent that rather than driving a scene forward (which was how we imagined it) I would sit there and be like, “There is Mike Birbiglia talking to Sam Rockwell and Anna Kendrick is there!” I would find myself watching and Joe would say, “The scene is working.” I’d be like, “Yeah, it’s great.” I’d forget that I’m the one who has to drive this.

Q) With so many improvised scenes, was there something you were sad to see cut?

Jake: No, because it is not like an improvised studio movie or even “New Girl” where you shoot so much and then whittle it down. We shot this movie on film and our budget was not a lot so all that money went to film. So, you can’t shoot a scene five or six times just to do it. Mostly, what was shot in it. I heard some stuff with Orlando [Bloom] that got cut.

Q) What do you think the film explores as far as modern relationships?

Jake: I think what Joe and I were interested in saying that with relationships with kids it is not always easy and sometimes things happen that you are not always the most proud of. You can take something about those experiences and take them home and they can actually make you guys stronger. So, you hear stories about people who take time off and re-find each other. I think that is something we both found strong rather than a sign of weakness.

Rosemarie: So many people want to get married and really want to be married to the people they are married to. They just need a minute to oxygenate the marriage and bring a novelty to it. I think we made a movie about that, for people who really want to be married to the person they are married to. It’s just not easy over the long haul to keep everyone feeling alive.

Q) Do you think her seeing Saturn made her realize what she wanted all along?

Rosemarie: Of course. I think that Lee realized that the world is so vast that it puts some things in perspective like it does, where you have a moment in nature and everything starts to make sense. I also think that at times when you sit across from someone and they are as dreamy as Orlando Bloom’s character you realize you have it pretty good at home and it is worth fighting for. I don’t think she wants to stay on the beach. I think that moment was enough for her and blew her mind more so than the night she was already having.

Q) Was it a conscious decision to have Lee (the wife) have the extramarital kiss and not Tim?

Jake: That was working on a Joe Swanberg movie. When they were doing those scenes on the beach, we had not written in that they kiss.

Rosemarie: Orlando just really fought for it. .[laughs]

Jake: Yes, Orlando insisted on it. [laughs] So, that was something that when they got to the beach that night that Joe wanted to see happen and he pushed for it. That was something, in the moment, that Joe felt really right.

Q) There are a lot of dichotomies in the film like with single vs. married and public vs. private school and then you have your characters living in a duplex and Tim and Phil have only been friends for two years. Then, Lee and Ben wear the same color shirt and jacket on the beach. What thematically did you mean by that?

Rosemarie: I don’t think there was anything in the things you said; although, your eye is amazing! I think it was more meant to be between Brie Larson’s character and the character Lee. There are supposed to be some similarities about how Lee was when she was younger. Those might be just the things that happened from the collective unconscious of the movie.

Jake: I really think what is interesting about the question is that part of the fun of working on a Joe Swanberg movie is that we didn’t department heads. We didn’t have a costume department. Joe just told people to wear what they wanted to wear in the movie. So, a lot of things like those connections – I believe everything you just said is really interesting and right, but not thought about or discussed. There were moments that we needed to happen like for Tim to give this woman his wife’s  dress, we wanted it to be a major betrayal. Even though you could see that as innocent, I don’t think there are a lot of women that would like some other woman wearing her clothes. These were things that happened, but we didn’t consciously connect them all.  When people connect them all, I think that is a neat way that people make movies.

Q) What do you want people to take away or understanding from seeing it?

Jake: Personally, at the end of the day, I make movies because I like to entertain people. So, I would like people to enjoy the journey. This is a smaller movie. It’s a character piece. It’s slower. I think people who like movies that are more character studies and take their time. Rather than take a lesson, I want people to have not regret that hour and a half of their life. If they watch it on VOD or go to a theater, I want to have made their night enjoyable. If you go to dinner and a movie, I don’t want them to think, “I wish I hadn’t have seen that movie.” We wanted to tell a story that was ideally fun to watch, kept you in it and had characters that you could relate to and would think they were real and a story that ends in a way that was satisfying.

Rosemarie: I think Joe makes movies in a way that is personal to him. He is not afraid to tell the actors why it is so personal to them. His hope and my hope is always that somebody goes, “Oh that movie was made for me! That movie is a lot like my life and what I’m aspiring to do or not to do.” It’s not made for everybody.

Jake: When you make a movie of this size, you’re not trying with a net to catch every fish, but the fish you catch you really hop e love it. I hope that the people who watch it really connect to it and that would feel like a big win.

*CONFERENCE CALL*